Thread: [News] Massacre & Conquest Free Military Strategy MMOG

Massacre & Conquest (M&C for short) is a military strategy game set in the fantasy post-apocalyptic world. It is developed by China-based Gamebox, which publishes AD400 and YouJoy’s Odin Quest.

Release Date: September 18, 2012
Publisher: GameBox
Developer: GameBox
Genre: Strategy

Massacre & Conquest tries to innovate itself by incorporating something new in the base-building part. So the first thing you will notice in the game is the unique way it portrays through a navigable map. A lot of RTS games portrayed the city’s overview as same static background art with no discernible geographic links to one another. As a result, your understanding of the relationships between different territories and factions was often vague. M&C’s single-map display shows all territorial details, cities, and borders right in one place, so you can track in real-time events with the world map and tangibly grasp the latest information. You’ll actually see armies on the march to war, although they’re only represented by tiny sprites. But thanks to touches, it generally feels like your actions have a more immediate effect than in other RTS entries.

The other major difference is the way players manage constructions. Constructing or leveling up buildings in the game doesn’t take any time at all. They are done in a blink of moment. The game introduces the “time bar” system: time spent in each upgrading or constructing is added in overall building time counter and gradually stacks up, and construction/upgrade time varies in each building. The overall building time counter can be accumulated up to 5 hours, which means if the timer exceeds a total of 5 hours, players will not be able to perform construction or upgrade anymore. Based on my gaming experiences so far, this new construction concept poses both merit and drawback. The merit is that player is able to time the upgrade correctly by doing simple mathematics. If you are about to go off-line, for example, you can construct or upgrade buildings that cost small time span and keep pushing the timer until it becomes closer to 5 hours, then you upgrade the “larger cool-down” building, and then the timer will go over the limitation. The drawback is that, since you cannot extend the overall cool-down cap, you may find out that you can only level up one building each time, which is a sharp contrast to things you experienced in the very beginning when you are even able to upgrade buildings in rapid succession.

To attack a wandering neutral mobs or stationed guards deployed by other players, you need to recruit combat units and discharge them for expedition, and you can manually control the units using simple right-click manner. When you bump into the enemy unit, the combat will occur. It just then plays out the auto-combat animation, during which you are not able to maneuver the unit. For the duel, both sides start moving from their own starting location and charge forwards each other and engage in close combat when they get into contact. It’s a pity that the combat is not really “real time”, so you are not able to play little micro trick, for example, perform hit and run tactics to get your opponent in or out of punching range. Besides, although I do not have direct control over my unit, I was still able to click the skill icon on the unit’s action bar to use quick skill, which is the only strategic setting in combat.

Massacre and Conquest is a very ambitious game taking on the web-browser based genre. As far as I can see it has delivered some innovative concepts and little negative factors to complain. So if you are a strategy game fan, just give it a shot. It has a bunch of surprises for you. One more thing, once you start your journey in the game, you’d have to tolerate the slow pace of game progression, because it’s just the part of fun.

Play Massacre & Conquest